Layla Francine Weschke Boyd (aka Layla the Impaler) is an artist based in the United Kingdom. Trained as an illustrator, she works primarily on paper in ink, watercolour and pastel.

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She comes from a family of artists, including her grandfather, the Cornish modernist painter Karl Weschke. Having lived with depression since childhood, a severe episode led her to being urgently referred for inpatient care. As well as Severe Depressive Disorder, whilst undergoing treatment and therapy, Layla was newly diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, an extraordinarily insensitive label for a complex of interlinked symptoms: “significantly impaired functioning, including a feeling of emptiness, lack of identity, unstable mood and relationships, intense fear of abandonment and dangerous impulsive behaviour, including severe episodes of self-harm”.

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Boyd’s recent solo show Drawings from the Nuthouse (Fourth Wall Gallery, Folkestone, 2023) presented drawings made during and after her stay in a psychiatric hospital. These sketch-book-scale works in stark ink and luminous wash depicted the various flora of the hospital, both cultivated in its grounds and gardens, and presented in vases on its wards. In this strange context, flowers function to soothe the clinical edges of the environment, and to tether those inside with their loved ones, friends and family beyond its walls who send bouquets as tokens and avatars of love and care.

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Her new work expands this responsive repertoire beyond botanical illustration, drawing upon modernist and expressionist figurative traditions to articulate a caustic presentation of other conventional subject matter, including portraits, still-lives and nudes. Through a combination of distended form, acidic colour and disorienting framing, her drawings balance an aesthetic sensibility with a targeted jar of unfamiliar perspectives.